Stillborn
by The Illegible
Summary: It might as well be goodbye.


It is nearly time, when she's spoken to the Crystal Exarch. Preparations for the golem are all but complete. The sky blazes white, flickering sunless and hot and unrelenting.

The grass is brittle underfoot, but there is something familiar and reassuring in the taste of salt on a Kholusian breeze. Not so different from when she bade Aldenard goodbye from a port in Limsa Lominsa. From the months spent on a creaking boat, where waves would rarely spray high enough to touch. As there, so here seabirds scream overhead.

They all know better than to stray near Mount Gulg.

"I'll return before long enough," says the Warrior of Light, and there is warmth as she says it. "Just need to clear my head a while."

"Do you want company?" asks Alisaie, young and sweet and wholly unaware.

She shakes her head. "No no, that's alright… but thank you. There's a loose end that wants for my attention. I doubt there will be another opportunity."

And so she goes.

Past the ladder, past Tomra, over the jagged landscape of Scree to where one might briefly forget this horizon is not infinite. Here she stands, searching. Waiting.

She shuts her eyes.

"Are you there?" she asks quietly.

Only the wind and the distant sea, the birds and a rattle of stones-in-motion.

"Emet-Sel-" she begins more loudly, then stops, then smiles. Brings her fingers to her lips and sets loose a high, piercing whistle.

One moment goes by.

Two.

"That isn't always going to work, you know," says the Ascian, stepping from a plume of darkness. Stark contrast against the world in his Garlean finery. Of course he casts no shadow. From how his lips quirk she can see he, too, remembers his instructions in Rak'tika. "I'll have you know I was nearly a malm off this time. It's practically finished, now."

"I know," she says, and despite everything the humor which sparks her eyes is sincere. "My apologies for tearing you away… would you sit with me?"

Emet-Selch frowns, and that alone is enough to make his question obvious.

"I've spoken to so many people already," explains Norvrandt's Warrior of Darkness, "and you've made it perfectly clear you will not be left out. Thought I might beat you to it, this time."

A smile in-turn, reflexive. Yellow eyes dart down and then return to her.

"Oh, very well. It wouldn't do to turn my nose at such consideration, now would it?"

One step. Another.

He finds her side, and when he does it is Emet-Selch who sits first.

She follows.

For a moment, they only watch the pull and push of dwindling tides. Were circumstances otherwise, they might have been mistaken for an ordinary pair enjoying one another's company.

"What do you know of me?" she asks after a while. "Not the Warrior of Light… me."

"You do have the most peculiar habit of separating yourself from your deeds," says Emet-Selch, and for all the signs of weariness he wears he does not sound unhappy then. She wonders if he made such expressions as the emperor of Garlemald, too.

"…what I know is less than I anticipated, but more in ways you remain yet unaware of." He stops. Considers carefully. "You may be closer than I gave you credit. It reminds me… no. I only wonder if things would be different, if the rest met your standard. There is no denying you are endowed with such admirable qualities as kindness, bravery, altruism. But outside of an adventuring capacity, I must confess to having grossly underestimated your cheek."

She laughs at that, loud and unapologetic. "I know not what I expected to hear, but… gods." When she manages to reply, it is accompanied by the slight flush that often accompanies such admissions. "After Elidibus and Lahabrea, I must confess to having grossly underestimated you as well."

This appears to please the Ascian, who goes so far as to smirk in turn. "Good. It's why I kept them for so long."

For a while, they remain content with that.

Then the Warrior says, hesitant, "What you told me, before… the ones you lost. I want you to know I believe you." He turns, and she finds his expression has shifted. She is being studied now, searched. "…has there truly been no one since?"

His brows knit, and he glances away. "The sundering may not have broken me, or my… associates," he says. "But while we seek a common goal, what other ties we had have grown strained across millenia. There is a reason I keep my own counsel."

"You ran nations," she says quietly. "You married, sired heirs. I expect it was more than once."

Emet-Selch closes his eyes, and it strikes her that this is the most exhausted she has seen him.

"Can you imagine," he asks, and there is no trace of bitterness in his tone this time, "what it means to seek someone you can trust, to suppose not once, not twice… hundreds of times over, that in your need you can be supported by creatures too fragile even to maintain themselves?"

The lines that edge his lips did not develop through joy.

"Man crumbles under his own sins, his own selfish desires" says the Angel of Truth. "For the most trivial of reasons he will embrace his baser instincts. Each and every one of you hides horror in your breast, and no matter how you strive against it this cannot be erased. Not so long as you remain thus divided."

She places her hand over his.

"Emet-Selch."

The Warrior speaks softly, and although this is not his name it's the best she can manage.

For a moment, between the warmth of her hand, his blindness to the world, the familiarity of her voice… perhaps he forgets.

She rests her cheek against his, and he leans into the contact.

When her fingers contract, gently, he only exhales.

They linger that way for some time, pretending a moment's comfort will matter against what must inevitably follow.

When she kisses him, this too finds his cheek.

Careful. Chaste. Like a friend.

She does not release her grip.

The Warrior has only begun to look again when his free hand finds her jaw, drags her back. Locks her mouth to his.

It isn't a matter of experience but of desperation. Emet-Selch kisses her hard, their teeth bumping inelegantly, fingers winding through her hair. He struggles to channel himself through a body that can't contain him, his breath coming fast even as she brings her remaining arm around his back. Holds him close. When she meets the Ascian with her tongue a tight, pained sound crawls from his chest into his throat, into her mouth in-turn. It almost scares her enough to stop.

Instead, the Warrior searches for him in the grooves of his spine beneath his coat. In how he continues to reach whenever they part, as if he is chasing something on the brink of escape. It reassures her to find him no colder than she is, betrayed by the same telltale pulse anyone might endure. The same give under touch.

Well, rest assured that if your heart can be broken, then so can mine!

Emet-Selch is only a man. Whatever mask he wears in his immortality, even he is not invulnerable.

It ends as suddenly as it began.

He stops trying.

She tastes salt.

When she pulls away he lets her.

His eyes are open now. Unseeing.

What she finds is not anger or even indifference.

Emet-Selch looks empty. His expression is slack, his lips slightly parted. Silent as a corpse, he seems wholly unaware of his own tears. It is in this disconnect that the Warrior remembers what he is.

Even now, she does not release his hand.

"Are you alright?"

Fingertips at his mouth. Self-reproach. He blinks.

Slowly, he focuses on her again.

She feels his departure even before the familiar black tendrils begin to snake their way across his body, leaving her with little more than smoke.

"Don't disappoint me," says Emet-Selch, his voice low. Harsher than his expression suggests possible.

_ Please. _

And so the Warrior of Light is left alone at the edge of a cliff, in a world with no future past its borders.

Eventually she must abandon this place as well.


End file.
